'Every Corner Is Fraught with Memory'

A.J. Liebling’s valediction – to New York City, The New Yorker and the grand celebration that was his life as a writer – was published two weeks after his death, in the January 11, 1964 issue of the magazine that had printed more than five-hundred of his pieces since he joined the staff in 1935. In “Paysage de Crépuscule,” the writer gazes out the window of his office, looking west down Forty-third Street at twilight: 

“The skyscrapers that make up the two walls date from the twenties, the period of the hollow ziggurat. The signature skyscraper of our own age is the upended glass coffin. When I look at the set-back shoulders of the old ones, I visualize them at the date of the crash, with suiciding  holders of mortgage bonds cascading from level to level, like spent fish coming down a salmon ladder. It was a brilliant epoch.”

 

Everything in the scene triggers memories. Liebling, a native New Yorker, can see the Paramount Theater Building where he interviewed the actress Pola Negri in 1931. He remembers the boxer Jack Willis, “the astrologo-nutritionist, yogist and poet,” who lived in the Hotel Woodstock. Much of the essay is devoted to James S. A. McDonald, the sports writer who went by the pseudonym Col. John R. Stingo, and who was still living at age eighty-nine in the Hotel Dixie down the block from The New Yorker. Liebling describes him as “my favorite writer” and “the best curve-ball writer since Anatomy Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, making the prose of his contemporaries look shabby and unfurnished.” As always, Liebling is attracted to bunco artists, confidence men, purveyors of dubious veracity.

 

He had devoted an entire book to Stingo, The Honest Rainmaker (1953). The racing writer worked for the precursor of The National Enquirer, where he wrote a column titled “Yea Verily.” Stingo is an old English word for “strong ale or beer,” and came to mean “vigour, energy, vim” (OED). The best line in the book Liebling consigns to a footnote: “The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.” And here’s the second-best: “The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”

 

In “Paysage de Crépuscule,” Liebling has Stingo recite the flim-flam man’s credo: “When I first knew the Colonel, in 1946, I congratulated him on his bonne mine. He was then, by his own count, seventy-two. ‘I have three rules for keeping in condition,’ he said. ‘I will not let guileful women move in on me. I decline all responsibility. And, above all, I avoid all heckling work. Also, I shun exactious luxuries, lest I become their slave.”

 

Near the conclusion of his swan song Liebling writes: “I cite these associations because I do not wish readers to think Manhattan has no soul. Every corner is fraught with memory.”  This final essay will remind seasoned readers of earlier Liebling triumphs, including the boxing and war reporting, The Earl of Louisiana (1961) and Between Meals (1962). He was a lifelong gourmand. He reveled in food and drink, and in the end, his pleasures killed him. Liebling died on December 28, 1963, at age fifty-nine.

[You can find “Paysage de Crépuscule” in Liebling at The New Yorker: Uncollected Essays (eds. James Barbour and Fred Warner, University of New Mexico Press, 1994).]